Excerpt
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeks to co-broker the Gaza peace process for his own prestige, to Hamas’s benefit, and at Israel’s expense.
Since the first stage of the Gaza Peace Plan went into effect on October 10, Erdogan has launched his plans to carve out a place for Ankara in the process. Between pushing Hamas to agree to US president Donald Trump’s “20-Point Plan” and deploying cleanup crews to the Gaza Strip, Erdogan envisions Turkey side-by-side with the United States at the head of the mediation game. For the Turkish president, it is not a matter of good intentions or moral example—it’s part of his quest to cement Ankara’s status as a regional Islamic power.
Turkey was the first Muslim-majority state to establish formal relations with Israel in 1949. But Erdogan has made it his personal mission to disparage the Jewish state and praise terrorists who murder Israeli and Gazan civilians alike as “the resistance.”
And yet his government now reaps praise from all corners of the earth, from the Hamas leadership to the United States. One need not look far to find that this fanfare is certainly undue.